What Jeremy Crow shows us about YouTube’s crusade against offense

What Jeremy Crow shows us about YouTube’s crusade against offense

I think I’ve said in the past that YouTube is headed in a noticeably censorious direction, getting rid of content they deem offensive to either themselves or prospective advertisers, based on very arbitrary conceptions of hateful content. And recently, it appears that I was proven right, again. Jeremy Crow, a prominent Luciferian occultists and one of the founders of the Assembly of Light Bearers (formerly Greater Church of Lucifer), has announced that a number of his videos have been shadow-banned by YouTube.

As Crow himself explains:

About a month ago several of my videos were “shadow banned” by YouTube/Google. If you aren’t aware, this is something that has affected an insane number of YouTubers. This form of censorship doesn’t outright remove the video from the platform, but greatly diminishes it’s possible viewership and eliminates any potential revenue earned from it. A shadow banned video will never show up in search results, the trending page or related video suggestions. Often it won’t even serve up the video to people subscribed to the channel! The primary ways you can find a shadow banned video is by having the direct link or by browsing the uploaded videos on a specific channel. In addition, these videos are excluded from the advertising revenue share. In other words, you’re going to get way less views and will earn no money off the video.

So why is Crow being targeted for shadow-banning by YouTube? Well, looking at the examples of shadow-banned videos given on his Steemit article (which will be linked at the bottom of this post), you may have noticed that all of them except one deal with the subjects of Luciferianism and Satanism. He explains that YouTube’s criteria for what is deemed non-advertiser-friendly includes political content (though strangely enough The Young Turks or CNN don’t seem all that affected), profanity, unpopular religions and apparently having a disheveled/unattractive appearance.

Promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use, and abuse of such items

Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown.

It might not be a stretch of the imagination to suggest that Jeremy Crow’s discussions of Satanism, Luciferianism and the occult would be filed under controversial subjects, but even so, I find it baffling to me how Jeremy Crows videos would be considered offensive. Last time I checked, the only people who might be offended are Christians, Jews or Muslims, and even then I don’t recall them having seen fit to mass report Satanist or Luciferian YouTube content. And setting aside the issues of “hate speech”, I’m not entirely sure what the threat is to YouTube’s bottom line. I notice in the article that Crow doesn’t mention a statement from YouTube on the issue, which if you’re shadow-banned you probably wouldn’t get anyway since you’re being banned without you knowing it. What this suggests to me is that YouTube flagged Luciferian videos for arbitrary reasons, without explanation.

Two things are certain in my eyes. Firstly, this is to me further proof of the utterly nonsensical and farcical nature of the parameters of hate speech. I have seen a number of YouTubers report videos being demonetized for absurd reasons, including a someone who uploaded a review of Sonic Adventure 2 it got demonetized for “controversial subject matter”. And a couple of months ago, YouTube introduced the limited state feature, which bans certain videos from receiving likes, shares, comments or revenue not necessarily for violating YouTube’s content policy, but for “offensive” content. It is done self-evidently to suppress wrongthink, but its supporters claim that it is supposed to be done to suppress extremist and radicalizing content. I have gone through lists of videos put under the limited state, in fact I have also seen a Twitter account that logs videos put under the limited state. You’ll find videos that can accurately be described as white nationalist or fascist propaganda, or videos that posit arguments for those systems, but you know what you won’t find on those lists? ISIS propaganda videos. And hey, if YouTube wanted to suppress videos advocating for totalitarian and violent political systems, you’d figure there’d be videos advocating for communism on these lists. But apparently not. The parameters for extremism are one-sided, driven by the ideological bias held by Google, which was documented in detail by former Google engineer James Damore in his essay. And when it isn’t, it’s just downright idiotic all round.

Second, if Jeremy Crow’s videos discussing Luciferianism and Satanism were shadowbanned, then it leaves me wondering just how many other occultists, particularly Left Hand Path occultists, have been shadowbanned. What about Michael W. Ford or E A Koetting, both of them prominent occultists in Left Hand Path systems who talk about largely similar subject matter to Jeremy Crow? Or Styxhexenhammer666, another occultist, albeit for more well known and popular because of his political commentary than for his occult videos? For all I know, Jeremy Crow may indeed be the only case of a Luciferian occultist getting shadow-banned, but if they’ve shadow-banned him, then why not others?